I agree! maybe in the nano farad range like .002uf = 2nfd = 2000pf. They are just too big to be .1pf. I don't know if I have ever beheld a .1 pf cap.
Normal capacitance between nearby wires might be in the .1pf range.

You should have something a bit more definitive in the way of a differential. Let me get this straight....You dad was holding the bare tube during the count runs! The human body is a big bag of moderating water and that can spoil the result you should lay the tube down near the fusor preferably at l...

Joe, thank you ever so much for your diligence and continued assistance and suggestions. You are helping to make these forums a better place. I have just added the atta-boy to Garrett Young's neutron club name, giving him credit as being the first one to exceed the mega n/s TIER in a 2.75 conflat cr...

Bruce said it all well. The moderator with tube in it should be at fixed distance X. The tube out of the moderator should be at that exact same distance X. The moderator must be a good distance away,(many feet distant). Only then is the count comparison more or less equal.

Another attempt at saying real soon now. Interesting, but it doesn't feed the bulldog. Lots of computation, yet little idea about the capability of the reliability of the neutron measurements in burst mode where RF might be an issue.

The micromase was pushed by Lesker for a few years and is no longer available. It was great and could warrant about one order of magnitude below a good mechanical pump that could go under 10 microns on its own. It had its own internal heater to purge bad stuff out and clean itself up. It was found b...

Chris has it right. USB is still forming and might never stop evolving the RS serials and GPIB are so dead, they are set in stone. Slow yet reliable and easily worked with to this day. You pay for the late and great super fasts which may or may not survive a new operating system or connectivity rage...

75khz may heat the ceramic caps a bit and reduce the full power duty cycle run times, but it is rare you would need tremendous full power runs. 40kv @ 10 ma is 400 watts. In Tesla work, it was found that the higher the spark interrupt rate, ceramic capacitors would drop in capacitance as the silver ...

My First fusion was with a mechanical pump that could hit 5 microns, backed by a micromaze that bottomed my TC gauge. (actual vacuum unknown). The best I ever did with fusor III was 250kn/s but I never got above 32 kv. Now that we are into the wall loading concept, day to day operation will see a bi...